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One of the key elements of any CRM plan is integration, the unification of all your company’s data sources and silo systems to create a single, holistic view of each customer.. Whether they are, business organization or system-based silos, they all conspire to make customer journeys fragmented, painful and costly.

A typical customer journey includes interactions via contact center, corporate portals and conventional emails. Yes every call, every click, every message counts. Enabling these journey points is paramount and Oracle is privileged to assist you in the strategic components to this journey via this webinar.

Oracle CRM OnDemand (CRMOD) Release 16 was my first encounter with a ready to use, complete End-to-End CRM application in a SaaS model, and its needless to say that I am biased towards this application. However, the reasons are not just personal; the application now in its 23rd release (with a roadmap to R24) has come a long way. It is a mature application and is as good as (if not better) most of the other offerings in the market.

But recent events in this space have raised doubts of the application’s life term. Many would argue that Oracle’s focus has shifted to the development and enhancement of fusion applications and Oracle CRMOD is on its way to retirement. While this is not entirely false, we still need to understand that the application is part of Oracle Sales Cloud and with its existing customer base, Oracle would find it difficult to move away from this product.

This is well substantiated by the recent enhancements and the fixes I have seen in the release 23. Oracle has delivered more than 35 enhancements with major themes being – Customer experience, Industry Innovation and Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). While the below screenshot shows the focus areas of Release 23, the roadmap for Release 24 is equally convincing.

R23 talks about integration with Oracle Social Relationship Management for Social engagement and monitoring and concentrated effort to build up the Life Sciences industry vertical for CRMOD. However, in this article, I would focus on the three most intriguing features (as per me) of Oracle CRMOD, their functionalities and recent enhancements.

1] ‘Business Process Automation’: From updating a field to building complex validation rules, used for automating tasks which were painfully manual or for defining rules that control the application’s usage, Business Process automation module of CRMOD is probably the single biggest component in terms of impact towards the application adoption. A well defined and well configured Business process can ensure that your application is controlled and structured.

Oracle CRMOD provides a robust framework to establish these business processes. As a systems analyst, you can create innumerable combinations of Actions based on the triggers available. Think of any action below and combine with the trigger to define your process.

The predefined functions in Oracle CRMOD boasts of a comprehensive list, which when stitched together with the operators offered can help you define and configure the most complex of rules and processes.

R23 enhancements – With R23, one of the key features in business process management is that the function ‘JoinFieldValue’ (function to extract field value from another object) could potentially have any record as the source and any record as the destination. The source records were previously restricted to OOB objects and Custom Object 1, 2 & 3. This meant that while designing the system, we had to take into consideration this limitation. However, now you could map your business entities without thinking of this constraint.

2] ‘Personalizing your Application’: Driven by its theme of ‘Customer Experience’ this section has seen a number of enhancements in the last few releases. The application though designed/configured globally in a certain way, provides the user the ability to control:

a) What they want see in the system &

b) How they want to see it

The list below (not limited to) highlights what users can control in the system, apart from being able to modify one’s personal information:

R23 enhancements – Dynamic layout capability is one of the most sought after features in Oracle CRMOD. A feature not yet available in recently developed applications. Prior to R23, users could only add/remove related information sections for a layout and this did not impact the dynamic layouts. But R23, takes this a step further by giving users the option to personalize the layout with individual sets of related information, each set mapping to a driving value in the pick-list.

3] ‘Ad-hoc Actionable Analytics’: Oracle CRMOD is powered with a light weight yet robust analytics engine. Having worked with multiple applications, I can confidently say that the reporting capability of CRMOD is more powerful than most of the competitive software available in the market. I like to use the phrase ‘Ad-hoc Actionable Analytics’ because with limited training, users with the right privileges could create meaningful reports and dashboards on the fly.

Business scenario* – “Head of a wholesale banking business unit wants to know the overdue opportunities by industry but at the same time wants to find out why the opportunities has not been closed” *- Screens shown below are for demonstrative purposes only and may not relate to real time scenarios

Oracle CRMOD provides a 3 step solution to this requirement:

A) 1st Level Dashboard Statistics :: Identify the Area of Concern

B) 2nd Level List of items :: Get More Information

C) 3rd Level Record view :: Take Action

R23 enhancements – Apart from support from multiple languages in analytics and introduction of some important subject areas, Release 23 brings in a personalization of Dashboards for user roles. Administrators could previously remove pre-built dashboards, but now you can customize and sort the display of dashboards.

Oracle CRM OnDemand, is a critical piece in the Oracle Cloud applications suite. It may not be the Primary Focus and preference but it is not going to retire anytime soon. As per me, Oracle has every reason to continue its enhancements and support for the next two years at least, which is quite a long time in any application’s life. Oracle CRMOD is here to stay and is very much ‘Alive and kicking’!!

Right contents in your social media fan pages, create a big impact in engaging your targeted audience. Though creating highly engaging contents is an art by itself, having right tools to build them is another major challenge / limitation to most of the Organizations.

In the last post on Oracle Social Cloud we discussed about how Oracle Social Cloud would help you to cut through the noise and hear what you like to hear that are of your interests like your brands, products, services, competition etc.. In this post I like to highlight some of the exciting features in Oracle Social Cloud that enables you to create highly engaging contents that can be published in your Organization Facebook page in a matter of few minutes ….

In its simplest form Oracle Social Cloud makes it possible to create interactive contents and publish in Facebook using “Views” section. The views module is supported by a WYSIWYG editor with rich controls to plug in various elements that would help you to build a highly engaging Social media content. The controls are grouped under five modules as Basic, Interactive, Feeds, Forms and Custom. The summary of various controls available under these buckets are presented in the below screenshot.

As you see above the kind of controls that you have under various buckets is quiet rich and one or more controls can be used to build an interactive post by simple drag and drop of this Control to the editor.

Let us dig into the usage of Controls with a very simple example. Assume you would like to run a Coupon Campaign where you want to collect user persona details of your Organization’s interest in exchange for a coupon that they can reimburse in a prominent e-commerce website.

You can do in simple 3 easy steps.

Step 1, drag the form module from “Basic” section in the editor

Step 2, expand the controls section to edit the control. As a first step build a form using WYSIWYG editor collecting user persona details of your interest. As you see below you have the flexibility to capture any kind of information using custom fields that are available in the form editor

Step 3, go to the images section to add an image that appears before the form is presented, here a simple compelling image which displays the intended message of “Click here for $10 coupon” and an image that says a “Thank you message” on user submitting the form is used.

That is that you have to do to create this campaign. Use the Preview button to view how it appears and publish it in your Facebook account. All form data submitted by users can be downloaded later from the same control in form of a simple CSV …

In summary I believe having a right tool like Oracle Social Cloud to manage your social campaigns enables your marketing team to quickly create interactive highly engaging campaigns that would make a significant difference to your ROI in Social Marketing.

Traditionally, CRM self service portals used to be the web support channel for customers. Some companies extended this concept and used such portals for employee management, dealer management etc. However, such use cases are very minimal.

Even today, majority of the self service portals in the market focus on these standard functions only:

Register / Login

Search / View Knowledgebase published by the company

Create Service Requests

While these basic features are required, modern web support (whether it is self service or assisted) wants to go a step beyond this. For example, let us take an example of a college, deploying their own self service portal for students.

College students get a login (or can register) in the portal

They can login, see the college knowledge base / download documents

In case they have a support requirement, they can create a service request

Wait a minute, when you say “Service request” what do you mean?

For a student, it may mean many things: Requesting for a mark sheet, Requesting for an attendance certificate, Requesting for a change in the profile phone number etc.

While all these are service requests, their nature is not the same. For example, when requesting for a mark sheet, they may have to provide additional details such as their examination number, year of exam etc. When requesting for an attendance certificate, they may have to say this certificate is required for what purpose, from which date to which date etc.

This means, even though portals call it with a single term “Service Request”, it actually means many things. You can’t have a single form and expect that to serve every possible service request case. Either that form will be too generic not serving the purpose, or it will be too long and users will run away.

Customer Service Management

To take care of such problems, CRMIT’s CRM++ Self Service Portal is moving in the direction of dynamic SR Types Management feature. This means, companies implementing CRM++ SSP can design their own types of Service Requests, and design unique forms for each one of them, with specific fields, labels they are looking for. Customers will love this because only targeted questions are asked, Agents will love this because all the information they need to solve a particular problem is right in their hands.

Face language and body language are important components in everyday communication. Many times you may be hearing something, but the other person would be meaning something totally different. They may be hiding the real message intentionally or unintentionally.

Either way, success in communication happens only when we understand the real message, whether the other person likes it or not. Experts would be able to get this purely by observing body language, tons of research material (and criticism) is available on this subject.

What if there is a special body language, where you don’t have to “guess” at all, but the other person leaves clear signals which can be used to find out their real intentions?

Such a tool may not be feasible in real life, but in digital media, you always provide such signals. It may be simply visiting a website, or spending quality time there on a particular article. If someone cares to collect those signals, they can pretty much make out your intentions.

Oracle calls this “Digital Body Language”. Their Marketing Cloud (Eloqua) has a unique process which can analyze a web user’s behaviors such as web site visits, white paper downloads, social interactions, searches, Email responses and more, and can create an intelligent guess on their intentions.

This information is extremely valuable to marketers. While they traditionally depended on information such as demographics, purchase patters of their customers, now they can find out exactly what those customers intend to do on your website, and target accordingly. These micro segments will be much more powerful and likely to get you results.

While this information is extremely useful in campaign management, Sales teams also can find good uses for it. Let us say you are meeting a customer and would like to know their past interactions before speaking to them, digital body language analysis can give some unique insights to win that deal.

Modern business is a digital game and tools like Oracle Marketing Cloud can help you stay ahead! Visit CRMIT to Know more. www.crmit.com

Sales Cloud (Fusion CRM) release 7 is quite refreshing for those using the application since earlier releases. When I drove through the latest release 7, I knew the wait and the hype built around this release are justified.

Apart from bringing much anticipated enhancements around improving user experience, this release tried to take Mobile, Social & Analytics features to a new level.

From the perspective of an administrator, attempts made in the areas of Extensibility, Data Management and Environment Migration are appreciated.

Let me give you few specifics

User Experience: Navigation
Navigation was a major concern in previous releases. It was complicated and inconsistent or was just not there.

Now I see lot more availability and consistency in desktop UI.

Except Sales Calendar where the context of a calendar item isn’t completely built {this observation is addressed by FUSE (Simplified UI)}, navigation among core sales entities is fully enabled.

User Experience: Search
Enhancements in this area are focused around removing constraints, de-coupling search options and predefined lists and rectifying issues with filters etc.

Other notable improvements are role based saved searches (driven by admin), user level personalization of filters and introduction of record set attribute etc.

User Experience: Contextual Help
Contextual help is consistently available across all high use pages in the application. The help directory content is now fully aligned with the section form where it is invoked.

User Experience: FUSE
FUSE (Simplified UI) is for quick performance of regular tasks. A major enhancement to achieve buy-in from Sales folks.

You could perform all actions at par with desktop UI and can also quickly move to desktop UI to access more advanced features or more detailed information.

You could personalize the user experience by setting up required logo, theme etc. and setup a homepage announcement.

Though role based customization of simplified UI is possible, it is limited to overview/list pages only.

Other enhancements include
• Marketing insights for a Lead and Contact from Eloqua
• Customer Center Improvements –
> Competitive Presence – For Sales/Account Planning
> Graphical demonstration of Account Hierarchy (vs. Org. hierarchy)
> Tracking Contact ‘relationships’ by timeframe – An important detail sought by many customers/prospects alike.
• Lead Qualification/Management is now moved to Sales functional area

Core SFA: Sales Performance Management
Except few incremental improvements, enhancements in this area are minimal. From our experience simplification of Territory Management is very much required and it is a roadmap item.

Business Process Composer
Business Process composer is another big leap enhancement and kind of re-introduced in release 7.

As part of Oracle SOA Suite, the Oracle Business Process Management Suite contains a design-time tool for creating and adjusting BPMN 2.0 compliant BPEL processes, known as the Process Composer. Logically, as this tool can make significant changes to the way functionality runs, it is not therefore for use by normal end-users or administrators, and so is not found embedded inside Fusion Applications.

The Process Composer contains extensive options for creating new processes, as well as importing, adjusting, and redeploying the standard BPEL processes provided by Fusion Applications. Amongst other things, this includes support for manipulating Oracle Business Rules (OBR) to add complex conditional processing logic, as well as Human Workflow for interacting with users for hands-on activities, such as approvals.

Business process flows (e.g. approval flows) created using the process composer could be triggered using object workflows (e.g. of an Opportunity) that initiate based on some change in an object e.g. field update.

The seeded templates in Oracle Business Process Composer provide services, business rules, and tasks, which we can use for configuring customized processes.

Business Process Composer-Seeded flow screenshot

Marketing: Eloqua Integration
Eloqua integration with Sales cloud is expected to augment customer interaction history in Sales Cloud, provide bi-directional lead nurturing between marketing and sales along with fully enabled Marketing automation and multi-channel campaign capabilities. Following table demonstrates what Eloqua Marketing cloud has to offer in comparison to Fusion Marketing (though it is purely driven by what is missing in Fusion Marketing)

Eloqua Marketing Cloud Vs. Fusion Marketing

Reports
Most anticipated feature in the area of reports is ability to drill/navigate from a report to a transactional record using Action Links and it is available in release 7. It is facilitated through calling web pages instead of using ADF contextual event.

Action Links are available for the following objects:
• Customer
• Contact
• Lead
• Opportunity

Other enhancements include
> Use alerts to proactively detect issues and business potential (condition based report scheduling)
> Add enhanced visualizations, like a waterfall chart to your reports
> Embedding OSN conversations in custom report/dashboard (i.e. see all conversations for a record in one place using report view)

Environment Migration
This allows export and import of setup data and customizations across Oracle Sales Cloud environments on the same release and patch.

Modularity Consolidation
Now we can
> Call attributes from one object to the other. This is limited to ‘Common’ application area and limited to Sales Account.
> Build relationships among objects from across application areas e.g. now we can connect a custom object created under Sales application area with a custom object created under ‘common’ application area.
> Build cross application validations e.g. When a sales account (Customer Center application area) status is turned ‘Inactive’ prevent sales user from creating an opportunity (sales application area)

Brief detail of other enhancements

Groovy Web Services Invocation
This is great. Now we could invoke a web service using the groovy in object workflows.

E.g. when an opportunity has reached ‘Closed/Won’ stage, invoke a service to create a quotation through Big Machine and update finally approved quote value back to sales cloud.

Mobile: Fusion TAPOracle Sales Cloud on iPad using Fusion Tap has become ‘general availability’ from release 7 which is a specialized application for tablet devices.
With Release 7, Oracle Fusion Tap is available in 21 languages.

Social Network (OSN)
Social objects available to be enabled in Release 7 are Customer, Opportunity, Lead, Partner Account, Reference, Competitor, Organization, Person and Group. Sales Cloud administration can decide which objects to enable as social, and which fields to expose on the objects’ Wall.

Desktop UI Configuration
In Release 7, we can edit subtabs using Page Composer.

Social CRM is the latest update in the Customer management Industry. With the sudden growth in social media platform, it’s through social CRM that you can connect in a more personal level with your consumers and track their daily activities. Nowadays, you will find a number of software systems that are ready to help you with social CRM technology. Let’s not waste another minute in chit chat and start exploring the following points that will help you in understanding their work methods and how you can achieve effective results with the system –

Social CRM helps you to Connect with Consumers on Social Media Platform

Features

Do you really wish to make a difference with your social CRM techniques? Then it is essential that you buy software systems that help you to employ an equipped CRM method technique. With these software systems you will be able to collaborate efficiently with others who belong to the other side of the mark of formal authority. This will significantly help you to accomplish your goals in a definite period of time.

Now, with social CRM, you can also follow people, their status updates and even share your views with them. With every post that you update, you can even attach a CRM linked file. With social CRM, you will be able to maintain customer interactions and engagements with transactions and operations being a byproduct. The system is also enabled with active tool management that makes it really simple to connect with your consumers through comments, file sharing and links.

You can even improve your company products through social online forums, where consumers will disclose their views and regards about the products and how you can improve them to attain better customer relationships. Most of these software systems are created with web technology 2.0 as base framework. It is chiefly information sharing stand point where consumers and sellers get to know each other in a more personal level.

Benefits

These software solutions are great problem solvers. You can use them to assist you in both cross and up sells. They help you to build a strong customer bond and improve the productivity of the business. You also get to establish a number of social profiles and groups through the means of automated centric processes.

The platform is secure which makes it absolutely safe for your organization to share information with other potential members of your company. You also get to create system feeds of records that are closely followed by users.

Conclusion

Social CRM systems help you to find and import leads. You get to measure the amount of money spend on marketing. You also get to scrutinize the effect of every single marketing program. Apart from these, you get to capture the contact information and important sale news. You can also recognize the sale prospects through the means of advanced search options. I hope that the article provides you with enough knowledge of Social CRM and how they work to help you in building customer relationships.

Author’s Bio: Alisa Martin is a profound writer and is popular for her authenticate writings. She mainly writes about business advertisement such as “Social Media marketing is one of the most proficient ways of online marketing(http://completeseoservice.com/)” and several other topics.